


it's in the water baby (it's between you and me)

by callunavulgari



Series: TW Bingo [10]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: M/M, Nogitsune Trauma, Werewolf Stiles Stilinski, epidemic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-14
Updated: 2014-06-14
Packaged: 2018-02-04 16:30:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,301
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1785790
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/callunavulgari/pseuds/callunavulgari
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“I can’t go around biting everyone, Stiles,” Scott explains apologetically the day that Stiles’ old babysitter comes down with the virus. “I just can’t.”</p><p>“But you could save people,” he insists, angry, because it’s just started seeping in that there’s nothing that Stiles can do about this.</p><p>“I could also kill them,” Scott says, and he’s exhausted, dark bruises around his eyes. He hasn’t taken off his scrubs yet, even though there’s a new law about to come into effect that will make it so nurses and doctor’s have to burn their clothes before leaving the hospital. Getting into the hospital nowadays as a healthy individual is harder than getting through security at the airport. There’s decontamination stations — with bleach. Stiles huffs and turns away from him, goes back to his cheeseburger and picks at it listlessly.</p>
            </blockquote>





	it's in the water baby (it's between you and me)

**Author's Note:**

> For my TW Bingo square: Epidemic. This is actually one of the first fics I started for TWBingo, but the one scene towards the middle gave me some issues, so it's coming out now instead.

It’s not zombies. Stiles could deal with zombies — he’s been waiting his whole _life_ for zombies. He’s got a plan and everything, and seriously, it’s come a long way since the shitty one him and Scott had outlined in the fourth grade. After all, after werewolves, zombies wasn’t too much of a stretch.  
  
So it’s not zombies.  
  
The reports are slow at first — the news making casual mention of measles and polio outbreaks, resurgences of old diseases that should have _stayed_ gone when vaccinations started up years ago. By the time word gets out that it’s _worse_ , that it’s something _new_ , it’s pretty much too late.  
  
“I can’t go around biting everyone, Stiles,” Scott explains apologetically the day that Stiles’ old babysitter comes down with the virus. “I just can’t.”  
  
“But you could save people,” he insists, angry, because it’s just started seeping in that there’s nothing that Stiles can do about this.   
  
“I could also kill them,” Scott says, and he’s exhausted, dark bruises around his eyes. He hasn’t taken off his scrubs yet, even though there’s a new law about to come into effect that will make it so nurses and doctor’s have to burn their clothes before leaving the hospital. Getting into the hospital nowadays as a healthy individual is harder than getting through security at the airport. There’s decontamination stations — with _bleach_.  
  
Stiles huffs and turns away from him, goes back to his cheeseburger and picks at it listlessly.   
  
.  
  
“Betas can’t turn people,” is the first thing that Derek says to him the next day. He looks almost as tired as Scott does, but that makes sense, because he’s been volunteering at the hospital too, taking pain from patients under the guise of reading them storybooks.   
  
They’ve all volunteered — the werewolves that are still here, alongside Kira and Malia. Everyone has, except for Lydia and Peter. Lydia because she’s feverishly working on finding a cure, biting down screams every fifteen minutes and Peter because he doesn’t like hospitals, but also because he’s kind of a dick.  
  
“I know that,” Stiles growls, scowling at him. Derek scowls back, which is familiar, normal even. It makes Stiles feel better for all of a minute, which is when Stiles coughs.  
  
When he looks back up, Derek is giving him a wide-eyed, terrified look, and that — _that_ is not normal. That is how Derek looked when he carried Erica’s corpse back to them, when he’d stared at his own claws, slick with Boyd’s blood, when he’d held Cora’s hand and brushed kisses against her pale, sweaty brow. That is not a normal Derek look, and it terrifies him.  
  
“Dude, it’s just a cough,” he insists, and flinches when Derek gets up in his space, stretching a hand out and carefully brushing his pinky along the corner of Stiles’ mouth.   
  
His finger comes away red.  
  
Stiles stares at it, the world rushing in his ears, and swears. “Well, that’s not good.”  
  
.  
  
Derek takes him to Scott, who is thankfully not at the hospital. He manhandles Stiles into the passenger seat of his own damn jeep and drives to the McCall house like a bat out of hell. When he gets there, he yanks Stiles in after him, bursting through the door and dragging Stiles into the middle of Scott’s living room, where he and his mom are — or were, as the case may be — napping.  
  
“He’s sick,” Derek snaps, fingers like a solid shackle around Stiles’ wrist. “You’re going to bite him. Now.”  
  
Scott’s eyes flash red, and Stiles doesn’t know why, if it’s because Derek had ordered him or if he’s shocked by what he’d said. He doesn’t know, but it doesn’t matter, because seconds later, the red eyes die down, and Scott just looks puzzled. “What?”   
  
Derek snarls and drags Stiles closer to him, until the line of their bodies are nearly touching. “Alpha McCall,” he enunciates carefully, _formally_ , like he hasn’t known and been a part of Scott’s pack for years. “Please consider offering this human the bite, because if you don’t, he is going to die.”  
  
That wakes Scott the rest of the way up, shooting to his feet before Melissa can do much more than murmur a sleepy inquiry. Scott asks questions like what and are you sure and a dozen other things, but Stiles can’t seem to look away from the vase full of dead flowers sitting on the coffee table. He carefully doesn’t think about how he’s had so much exposure, between Scott and the rest of them coming to and from the hospital all willy nilly. He doesn’t think about his dad, who’s had just as much exposure as him.   
  
He hasn’t considered taking the bite in awhile, not since the nogitsune — not since that stupid MRI where Scott had pulled him close and told him, “I’ll do something.”  
  
He isn’t averse to it if it means, y’know, _staying alive_. Fuck, now he’s got that fucking song in his head. Talk about bad timing.   
  
He does, however, feel uneasy. There’s fear working its slimy fingers all over his heart, because this is it. He can either become a werewolf or he can die. Hell, if he takes the bite, he might still die.   
  
Scott and Derek are still bickering, but he can’t tune in long enough to follow along with the growled words.  
  
When he blinks back into awareness, Melissa’s crouched in front of him, her hands on his, which is weird, because when did he even get on the floor?   
  
Stiles looks at her, the soft concern in her eyes, and for a moment, just sees his mom staring back at him. He wonders what she would have done in this situation. He laughs, and it comes out cracked and broken, because _she probably would have died_.  
  
“Hey, hey, it’s okay,” Scott’s murmuring to him over his mom’s shoulder. He’s got a hand on Stiles’ forearm, but there is no darkness crawling up his veins. Stiles doesn’t hurt yet, and they’ve found out the hard way that the werewolf anti-pain game doesn’t work on panic attacks.  
  
“What happened to not being able to bite everyone who came down with this?” he asks blankly, because he is a total asshole who cannot let go of shit and Scott gives him this guilty, hurt look.  
  
“You’re different,” he tells Stiles, shoving past his mom and getting his face into Stiles’ armpit. It’s a shitty hug, because Melissa’s unwilling to let go of his hands, so Scott’s kind of lopsided and well, he’s got his face in Stiles’ armpit. “You know that.”  
  
Stiles huffs. “And what happens if it kills me?”  
  
Scott flinches, but it’s Derek who answers him. “We’ll deal with it,” he says from where he’s standing a foot or so to the left. “If you die during the bite, at least we’ll have tried.”  
  
“But—” he starts, thinking of what that would do to Scott, how much worse it would be for him if what killed Stiles wasn’t the virus, but the bite that he dished out. Derek flashes blue eyes his way before he can finish the sentence, and Stiles trails off awkwardly.  
  
The house is silent for too long. He can hear the air kick on and the freezer barfing up ice. He can hear everybody breathing too loud into the quiet, and wonders how much worse it’ll be when he’s a wolf.   
  
“So we gonna do this, or what?” he asks, cracking a lopsided grin as he wraps careful hands around Scott’s shoulders and pushes him back. Scott makes a sound, high-pitched and frightened, and whispers, “not yet,” which…  
  
Which gets the arguing started up again.  
  
.  
  
He’s not fond of hallucinations. Stiles has had exactly one bout of hallucinations since the nogitsune, when an incubus got its claws into him and injected him with happy-fun-time drugs. It was actually pretty fun at first, when the incubus was getting a hand down his pants and murmuring dirty, filthy things into Stiles’ ear. It was totally fun then, like acid and ecstasy and every other drug he’s never cared enough to try is supposed to act, all wrapped up into one ball of happy, warm fire racing through his veins.  
  
It was still fun when the incubus, who looked just a little too much like Derek if you asked him, licked into Stiles’ mouth, jacking Stiles’ just the way he liked it.  
  
It was fun all the way up until when Derek and Kira had burst through the window and eviscerated the incubus in front of him. That was traumatic enough, but after the warm glow of impending sex had worn off, the other side effects started to kick in.  
  
They weren’t all sexy hallucinations, though they’d started out that way. Later Deaton would explain that the toxins were supposed to react that way, in case the incubus’s prey got away from it. The pheromone trail would lead the incubus back to the hapless human and the human, horny out of their mind, would happily fall right back into their arms.  
  
So yeah, sexy hallucinations to start with. He knows how hard it was for Kira and Derek to get him back to the car, because he’d been out of his mind at the time — images of sweat and skin running through his head — and had spent most of the time trying to hump one or both of them.  
  
According to a blushing, mortified Kira, the only reason they’d even gotten back to the clinic was because Derek had taken one for the proverbial team, letting Stiles crawl into his lap and suck bruises into his neck as Kira drove.  
  
Once they’d gotten to the clinic though, the hallucinations turned on him. He can’t remember much more than snapshots and a constant, steady stream of fear. He remembers the feeling of not being in control of his own body, of the nogitsune murmuring riddles into his ear, of the sight of his friends, dying or dead at his hands.   
  
It was pretty bad.   
  
The virus pulls him down into a puddle of hallucinations on the third day.   
  
They’re worse now, not just the nogitsune anymore now that he’s had new nightmares added to his subconscious. He sees Derek, cut up and groaning in pain beneath a fully shifted Kate. He sees Allison, corpse pale and rotting as she smiles darkly at him, using him as a pin cushion.  
  
“You did this to me,” she purrs, sliding another arrow into his chest. He squirms and screams — he apologizes, sobbing every time she touches him. She sounds like Kate, nothing like the Allison he remembers, and he hates himself for killing her, for turning her into this monster—  
  
He sees Cora, who tells him that he’d failed  — that he never actually revived her in the ambulance that night — that she’s dead and gone, that Derek’s going to find him and kill him for not saving her.  
  
He sees an endless stream of faces, Ms. Blake kissing Derek, who turns into his dad, who turns into Stiles just as she skewers him. He sees Peter, lips wrapped around Stiles’ wrist as he bites down. He sees Kali shoving metal through Derek’s chest, pinning him to the floor like a butterfly. He sees himself — no, no, not himself, the _nogitsune_ — holding a drill to Malia’s head. Then he sees it taunt Lydia, its teeth at her throat.   
  
Somewhere along the way, the nightmares all roll into one.  
  
“You have to do it now,” he hears Derek say at some point, when he’s somewhere approaching lucid for two seconds. “Bite him now, or I’ll rip out your throat and do it myself.”  
  
Then there’s pain, teeth tearing into his wrist and more pain than he knows what to do with.  
  
He slips into darkness, and feels a certain measure of immense relief when he doesn’t dream.  
  
.  
  
Stiles wakes up to an intensely dry mouth and lips so chapped that when he licks them, he tastes fresh blood.  
  
“I thought being a werewolf would at least mean no more chapped lips,” he mutters to whoever is sitting in the computer chair that’s pulled up to his bedside. He knows there’s someone there; he can hear their heartbeat just fine.  
  
“Your body went into overdrive trying to get the virus out of your system,” Derek explains, a noise like a book thudding shut sounding next to his ear. It’s loud — louder than he’d thought werewolf hearing was. Guess that proved that you really couldn’t understand this shit completely if you weren’t a werewolf. “You’re healing the rest slower than usual as a result.”  
  
Stiles groans and opens his eyes.  
  
“So how bad was it? I don’t really—”  
  
Remember. He doesn’t remember much, except for skin-crawling hallucinations and murmured voices, maybe the sensation of someone holding his hand.  
  
As if that’s some kind of cue, Derek shifts next to him and leans in, until he’s all that Stiles can see. Just him and the ceiling fan above their head. They’re still in Stiles’ room, but that makes sense. No reason to go to the hospital when it was going to all end with him either dying as a human or waking up a wolf. Derek’s hand slides into his and Stiles looks at it for a moment, startled. When he turns his attention back to Derek’s face, it’s creased in worry, heavy bags under his eyes, like he hasn’t slept in days. “It was bad. We thought that you weren’t going to make it.”  
  
“It wasn’t going to take?” Stiles asks, morbidly curious. He wonders if he started drooling that black stuff, like Jackson did before he became the kanima.  
  
Derek makes a humming noise and cards his other hand through Stiles’ hair. It’s an out of place gesture that makes the Stiles part of him — the part of him that’s had a crush on Derek for years now — wriggle with embarrassment. But there’s a new part somewhere inside him that happily accepts the gesture, the part that is screaming pack, and it’s that part that turns his face into the hand and nuzzles.  
  
Derek doesn’t even blink though, just smiles softly and brushes his fingers over the jut of Stiles’ cheekbone.  
  
“It took fine, we just— we were worried that Scott bit you too late. That you’d die before your healing kicked in.”  
  
“Hey, man, it’s fine,” Stiles tries to say, because Derek is starting to get that look he’d had before — the one he’d had when Stiles first coughed up blood. Clumsily, Stiles nuzzles even further into Derek’s hand and looks directly into his eyes when he whispers, “I’m okay now, and even if I wasn’t, it wouldn’t have been your fault.”  
  
Derek’s eyes are still wide. He murmurs, “I was scared. I thought you were going to die.”  
  
“Can’t get rid of me that easily,” he laughs, casting a glance around his bedroom. He thinks to ask where Scott is, where his dad and Melissa are, but all that gets firmly shunted to the side when Derek crawls into the bed with him and burrows his face in Stiles’ neck, as if he’s been waiting to do this for days. “Hey, hey, it’s okay.”  
  
“Yeah,” Derek whispers after a moment, lips working against Stiles’ pulse. “It is now.”  
  
.  
  
“That is all kinds of not fucking fair,” Stiles mutters, staring in horrified fascination as the first corpse pushes itself out of the dirt. “You can’t seriously take away zombies as a possibility and then _make zombies the end game._ ”  
  
“Stiles,” Derek hisses, and right, he should probably do something other than gape at the zombies. It makes sense though, why Lydia’s been having more luck with the virus than any of the scientists around the world, why this virus has been so brutal. Zombies. Of course it was going to be zombies.   
  
He shudders and refuses to think about what would have happened if Scott hadn’t turned him. It’s not enough to shake the thought of which of the pack would have put him down, when he clawed himself out of his grave. He hopes it wouldn’t have been Scott or Derek, that it wouldn’t have to be his dad. Maybe Kira or Malia. Peter even. Someone who wouldn’t hurt as badly when it came to putting a bullet through his skull. Chris could have done it, but he’s back with Isaac in France, and only shows up every once in awhile. With the air traffic grounded everywhere and a good half of the population dead or dying, he hasn’t been back in awhile.  
  
“ _Stiles_ ,” Derek hisses again and Stiles clubs the corpse in front of him in the head with the bat that he’s pretty sure he’ll never stop using. Claws and fangs are awesome, but with a beta’s strength behind his swing, the bat is nearly as effective and definitely less messy than the claws.  
  
He glances past Kira and Scott, who are going from gravestone to gravestone and making quick work of the zombies, to Derek, who’s frowning past a gleeful looking Malia, looking in his direction. Stiles rolls his eyes and makes his way across the graveyard, tucking himself under Derek’s arm and rubbing their cheeks together.  
  
“Get it together, sourwolf,” he murmurs, and Derek’s actually shorter than him now, ever since Stiles’ final growth spurt that happened like three weeks after he was turned, so he has to bend at the neck to kiss the frown off of Derek’s face.  
  
“Ugh,” Malia goes, flicking black blood off of her claws. “I can’t believe I almost lost my virginity to such a sap.”  
  
Stiles grins at her and makes kissy faces in her direction. He doesn’t think about her often, because as hot as she is, that was a bad time for both of them. She’s a cool chick and an awesome kisser for, y’know, having been a coyote for half her life, but she doesn’t feel the same way that most people do, so it wouldn’t have worked out anyway.  
  
“You thought I was a great kisser,” he teases and she wrinkles her nose at him, huffs, and bounds away in the direction that Cora went.   
  
“I’m blaming this on you,” Derek tells him. “You’re the one who kept going on and on about how it wasn’t zombies.”  
  
Stiles shrugs and smacks the bat into the face of a corpse that gets too close. It’s entire head explodes on impact, like over ripe grapefruit. “Yeah, well,” he says and shrugs again, because what can he say to that?  
  
He still doesn’t like wolfing out all that much. It feels worse than the super strength and enhanced senses do, too similar to the way his body felt when the nogitsune was stuffed into it. He’s learned control, over the last few months, and he’s probably not being very subtle about his absolute refusal to shift unless he has to, but no one’s giving him shit for it yet.  
  
He does shift now, because zombies are one of those situations where he kind of has to, and knows, has known since that first awful time shifting, that his eyes go blue as Derek’s. It’s a reminder, one that he doesn’t appreciate, but he’ll live with it. He’ll live.  
  
“You take the left, I take the right?” Stiles says, grinning at Derek.  
  
Derek rolls his eyes, but there’s a hint of a smile on his lips, something so small and insignificant that it wouldn’t matter, if not for the fact that Derek wouldn’t be smiling at all if he wasn’t here. “Sure,” he huffs. “First one to a hundred cooks for the pack.”  
  
Stiles grins brightly with a mouth full of teeth and steals a kiss before bounding off, calling back over his shoulder, “You’re on!”  
  


**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Distillation (The Hand That Feeds Remix)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4210158) by [BrighteyedJill](https://archiveofourown.org/users/BrighteyedJill/pseuds/BrighteyedJill)




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